Geetha Dholakia, portfolio programme director at TDK Ventures, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Geetha Dholakia built TDK Ventures’s portfolio programme development initiative from scratch five years ago. She now leads a growing portfolio engagement team that expedites collaborations between portfolio companies and Japanese multinational TDK. When she joined in 2021, she was the sole member of the CVC’s new portfolio engagement function, which now has five technical professionals.
Prior to this role, Dholakia was a research scientist and technology transfer innovation specialist at the NASA Ames Research Center.
Dholakia has established several initiatives to help portfolio companies engage efficiently and in a streamlined way with teams inside TDK. She organises an annual portfolio summit that brings together all of its portfolio companies and TDK business leaders. This in-person conference, with panels on engagement best practices and demonstrations, where founders and TDK can network and show off their technologies, has helped accelerate partnerships.
“Face-to-face interaction is certainly helpful in moving engagements forward, because both teams get a full perspective on each other’s capabilities”
“This face-to-face interaction is certainly helpful in moving engagements forward, because both teams get a full perspective on each other’s capabilities,” says Dholakia.
During the 2025 portfolio summit, Dholakia instituted an award for TDK teams that excelled in startup support and collaborations and had grown those to scale to create pathways for new products.
She also found it important to disseminate success stories of startup collaborations to the larger TDK members to boost the visibility of the CVC activity and its value to the company. Her team publishes a quarterly briefing on portfolio engagements with TDK in an internal publication that reaches a large TDK audience.
Dholakia also hosts a podcast “CVC Strategic Partnership Insights” to discuss best practices in portfolio management. “It is something that is good for the CVC community to learn. Internal facing, external facing – it is important to disseminate knowledge.”
The Emerging Leaders are mid-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders here.
